Toward a Motor Theory of Sign Language Perception

Researches on signed languages still strongly dissociate lin- guistic issues related on phonological and phonetic aspects, and gesture studies for recognition and synthesis purposes. This paper focuses on the imbrication of motion and meaning for the analysis, synthesis and evaluation of sign language gestures. We discuss the relevance and interest of a motor theory of perception in sign language communication. According to this theory, we consider that linguistic knowledge is mapped on sensory-motor processes, and propose a methodology based on the principle of a synthesis-by-analysis approach, guided by an evaluation process that aims to validate some hypothesis and concepts of this theory. Examples from existing studies illustrate the di erent concepts and provide avenues for future work.Comment: 12 pages Partiellement financ\'e par le projet ANR SignCo

A Database of Full Body Virtual Interactions Annotated with Expressivity Scores

Abstract Recent technologies enable the exploitation of full body expressions in applications such as interactive arts but are still limited in terms of dyadic subtle interaction patterns. Our project aims at full body expressive interactions between a user and an autonomous virtual agent. The currently available databases do not contain full body expressivity and interaction patterns via avatars. In this paper, we describe a protocol defined to collect a database to study expressive full-body dyadic interactions. We detail the coding scheme for manually annotating the collected videos. Reliability measures for global annotations of expressivity and interaction are also provided

Synthetic animation of deaf signing gestures

We describe a method for automatically synthesizing deaf signing animations from a high-level description of signs in terms of the HamNoSys transcription system. Lifelike movement is achieved by combining a simple control model of hand movement with inverse kinematic calculations for placement of the arms. The realism can be further enhanced by mixing the synthesized animation with motion capture data for the spine and neck, to add natural "ambient motion"

Gesture in Human-Machine Communication: capture, analysis-synthesis, recognition, semantics

International audienc

Corpus of 3D natural movements and sign language primitives of movement

International audienc